Identifying and managing common childhood language and speech impairments

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Abstract

Learning to speak is one of life’s most important accomplishments. Language, usually acquired so effortlessly, underpins every child’s learning and ability to interact with others and to establish relationships. Poor communication has profound implications for employment, health, literacy, parenting the next generation, and social inequalities. It is therefore of great societal concern that language, speech, and fluency disorders are among the most common developmental disorders.
The aim of this clinical review is to summarise the current information on language and speech impairments to help general practitioners, universal well child services, and paediatricians to identify the most common problems, understand their clinical course, decide when to refer and for what services, and understand what improvements can be expected.

Journal Title

BMJ

Volume

350

DOI

Copyright Statement

Copyright BMJ Publishing Group Ltd 2015. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits unrestricted, non-commercial use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, providing that the work is properly cited.